Reflections on Canada’s first international student cap

by Lisa Ruth Brunner and María E. Cervantes-Macías

In January 2024, Canadian higher education was rocked by a two-year intake cap on post-secondary study permit applications, amounting to a 35% decrease from 2023 (IRCC, 2024a; 2024b). Given the sector’s dependency on differential international student tuition fees (Statistics Canada, 2022) and the highest proportion of international post-secondary enrollments globally (IIE, 2023), the potential impacts were stark. Institutions’ desire for international student funds had become insatiable, and, for decades, no stakeholders – including the provinces, which hold responsibility for education in Canada – were motivated to question the underlying ethics of a system rooted in large wealth transfers to Canada from the Global South. But Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) finally decided to “rein it in” (CPAC, 2023, 13:59).

What happened? After all, just like its higher education system, Canadian immigration also depends on international students, both as temporary labour (during and immediately after their studies) and permanent residents. A growing number of Global North countries, in fact, rely on higher education as a “feeder for labour migration” (Kamm & Liebig, 2022, para. 4). The resulting education-migration nexus, also known as edugration, has become a celebrated strategy in the so-called global race for talent (Brunner, 2022). Immigrant-dependent governments presume international students to be ‘the best and the brightest’ and thus ‘easily integrated’ into local labour markets, requiring limited support as they contribute to tax bases over their lifetimes.

However, cracks in that strategy have emerged – first in Australia, and now elsewhere (Sabzalieva et al., 2022). There are strings attached to edugration’s extractive, neoliberal logics. Paraphrasing the playwright Max Frisch’s description of guest worker programs in Europe, governments want workers but get people instead. When post-secondary institutions recruit international students-as-migrants, they get people too. And people need housing. They need to support themselves and their families. They need to feel safe and dignified and have a sense of belonging. And, in the context of international students, they may need specialized services to adjust to the unfamiliar, inequitable conditions they face as newcomers, like discriminatory job markets.

Post-secondary institutions have no clear mandate to ensure these needs are met. Because international students are positioned as a source of economic subsidies to institutions, they are subject to a cold calculation: every dollar towards their needs represents a dollar subtracted from earmarked funds, resulting in uneven availability of support and infrastructure. When international students are not well supported by their institutions, they turn to the broader community to meet their needs. And that’s when they present complications for the federal government, since immigration also operates by the same cold calculation: international students are ‘ideal immigrants’ only when they are self-sufficient. The moment workers or students are revealed to be people – i.e., ‘real’ instead of ‘ideal’ – tensions arise.

In Canada, concentrations of international students in certain regions – especially at institutions with subpar or non-existent support systems – had ripple effects. The dominant racialized trope of their value to Canada as ‘cash’ became overshadowed in Canadian public opinion by the threat they supposedly posed as ‘competition’ (Stein & Andreotti, 2016). This was particularly acute in Canada’s tight, profit-oriented housing market, allowing the government to focus on voters’ fears rather than long term structural inequities ultimately based on capitalist Indigenous dispossession.

The federal government also came to see Canada as, in the words of IRCC Minister Marc Miller, “targeted for abuse and exploitations by some unsavoury actors” (CPAC, 2023, 15:54). Who is abusing who is a matter of perspective; many actors used IRCC’s policies to exploit international students, including employers, landlords, and recruiters. Miller focused on private “unscrupulous institutions” (CPAC, 2023, 16:26) that rely almost entirely on international student tuition and use Canadian permanent residency as a marketing strategy. Operating in a largely public higher education system, these private colleges were positioned by Miller as “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills” (CPAC, 2023 11:50), offering “garbage programs” and functioning as “backdoor entries into Canada” (Raj, 2024, 38:28). 

Exploitative private colleges undoubtedly deserve strong critique, as do the marketized systems which produced and allowed them to flourish. But it is also important to remember two points. First, many private “garbage programs” were delivered through lucrative curriculum licensing arrangements with public institutions. Second, the line between “unscrupulous institutions” and supposedly ethical ones, including public universities, is blurry. Through edugration, virtually all Canadian post-secondary institutions rely on an exchange of economic capital for an academic credential of inflated value due to its connection to (a chance at) Canadian permanent residency. The difference is the extent to which meritocracy is used to justify what has become a classist and (neo)racist global sorting system structured by Western supremacy.

The desirability of international students-as-migrants in Canada has also complexified. During recent stakeholder consultations, IRCC stated its plan to focus on the “quality of students, education and client services over quantity” and “attract and nurture top international talent” (IRCC, 2023, slide 7). At first glance, Miller’s positioning of international master’s and doctoral students as “the bright people that we need to retain” (CPAC, 2024, 16:24) seemed aligned with edugration’s rallying call to recruit ‘the best and the brightest.’ Along with a few other subcategories, master’s and doctoral students were exempted from IRCC’s intake cap. Their spouses and partners retained the ability to apply for open work permits, and the length of post-graduation work permits was extended for short master’s programs “in recognition that graduates of master’s degree granting programs are excellent candidates to succeed in Canada’s labour market and potentially transition to permanent residence” (IRCC, 2024b, para. 7).

On the other hand, IRCC restricted post-graduation work permits entirely at certain private colleges (IRCC, 2024b). A clear hierarchy thus emerged, based on international students’ likely post-graduation outcomes: private college programs were at the bottom, public undergraduate college and university programs were in the middle, and graduate programs were at the top.

However, this hierarchy does not match the reality of Canada’s labour market. First, desirable jobs for ‘the best and the brightest’ are not necessarily in Canada; immigrants who were former international students are “especially likely to leave Canada” (Bérard-Chagnon et al., 2024, p. 5), and the probability of an immigrant eventually leaving increases with higher education levels. Second, Miller also signaled the federal government’s intention to “work with” provinces’ requested study permit cap exemptions for trade schools, noting that “nursing or healthcare or in construction” are “where some of the needs are” (CPAC, 2024, 16:39). Indeed, shortly after the cap was announced, British Columbia Premier David Eby asked for exemptions in high-demand fields such as truck driving, warning that “we can’t have this cap impacting our healthcare system or the availability of childcare, or the ability to build the homes that we need” (Hunter, 2024, para. 3). In other words, Canada’s dependency on international students’ relatively low-waged labour also runs deep, exposing tensions between the short-term labour market needs of the provinces and the long-term economic outcomes valued by the federal government.

The dust from January’s announcement is far from settled. Still, despite the handwringing, it is unlikely that Canada’s long tradition of reliance on international students to address its national interest priorities (McCartney, 2021) will fundamentally change. It will simply become more targeted, refined, and directly controlled by IRCC’s interests. A meaningful challenge to its underlying logics will require much more.

References

Bérard-Chagnon, J., Hallman, S., Dionne, M., Tang, J., & St-Jean, B. (2024, February 2). Emigration of Immigrants: Results from the Longitudinal Immigration Database. Statistics Canada Demographic Documents. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2024002-eng.htm 

Brunner, L. R. (2022). ‘Edugration’ as a wicked problem: Higher education and three-step immigration. Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education, 13(5S). https://doi.org/10.32674/jcihe.v13i5S.4061 

Cable Public Affairs Channel [CPAC]. (2023, December 7). Federal government doubling financial requirement for international students [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_tmPo-UywI 

Cable Public Affairs Channel [CPAC]. (2024, January 22). Canada announces two-year cap on international student visas [Video file]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiTruogAsp4 

Hunter, J. (2024, January 29). B.C. seeks leniency as Ottawa reins in international student numbers. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/article-bc-seeks-leniency-as-ottawa-reins-in-international-student-numbers/ 

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC]. (2023, June 23). Modernization of the International Student Program: Presentation for partners and stakeholders [PowerPoint slides]. 

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC]. (2024a, January 22). Canada to stabilize growth and decrease number of new international student permits issued to approximately 360,000 for 2024 [News release]. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2024/01/canada-to-stabilize-growth-and-decrease-number-of-new-international-student-permits-issued-to-approximately-360000-for-2024.html

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC]. (2024b, February 5). Additional information about International Student Program reforms [Notice]. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/international-student-program-reform-more-information.html 

Institute of International Education [IIE]. (2023). Project Atlas. https://www.iie.org/research-initiatives/project-atlas/

Kamm, E., & Liebig, T. (2022). Retention and economic impact of international students in the OECD. In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Ed.), International migration outlook 2022 (Chapter 7). OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/30fe16d2-en  

McCartney, D. (2021). “A question of self-interest”: A brief history of 50 years of international student policy in Canada. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 51(3), 33-50. https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.vi0.189179 

Raj, A. (Host). (2024, February 9). Is Canada’s consensus on immigration fracturing? [Audio podcast episode]. In It’s Political. The Toronton Star. https://www.thestar.com/podcasts/its-political/is-canada-s-consensus-on-immigration-fracturing/article_53cf4984-c6d0-11ee-b574-4f2859d9434b.html 

Sabzalieva, E., El Masri, A., Joshi, A., Laufer, M., Trilokekar, R. D., & Hass, C. (2022). Ideal immigrants in name only? Shifting constructions and divergent discourses on the international student-immigration policy nexus in Australia, Canada, and Germany. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 6(2), 178–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/23322969.2022.2096106 

Statistics Canada. (2022, September 7). Tuition fees for degree programs, 2022/2023. The Daily. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220907/dq220907b-eng.htm 

Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2016). Cash, competition, or charity: International students and the global imaginary. Higher Education, 72, 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9949-8

About the Authors

Lisa Ruth Brunner is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Centre for Migration Studies) and Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow (Department of Educational Studies) at the University of British Columbia on xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) Territory in Canada. She conducts critical, interdisciplinary research on international migration and education, especially regarding migration governance, citizenship, and ‘integration’ in Global North and settler-colonial contexts. She has over a decade of practitioner experience as an international student advisor and has been a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant since 2014.

María Cervantes-Macías holds a degree in International Relations from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico, and a Master of Arts in Geography from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, her research explores the ways in which immigration policies and education impact the choices of highly skilled migrants throughout their lives, shaping their understandings of citizenship and identity.